Pulling Back the Covers of Children’s Literature - Melanie Koss

Melanie Koss

Imagine yourself as a young child reading picture books that never depict a character like you. Also imagine that the characters who do resemble you in some way are often depicted in a negative, stereotypical light.

You may implicitly learn that you do not matter or that you are inadequate.

This concerns Dr. Melanie Koss, a CISLL affiliate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction who studies how diversity is represented in children’s and young adult literature.

Koss is interested in whether children’s literature mirrors students in our classrooms, and whether the ways that diversity is represented impacts children’s identity development.

There are several reasons which, taken together, validate Koss’s concern and her research interests.

One reason is that, according to Koss, “Literature presents a window into humanity.” Consequently, children (and adults) learn about humanity via reading.

This is a powerful idea.

Koss is fond of Rudine Sims Bishop’s metaphor that literature can act as “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors”.

“A child can read a book in which they see a character reflected back – that is the mirror. The mirror validates the child’s importance,” according to Koss.

For example, if a young member of the LGBTQ community never encounters a character from their community, then that child may think their sexual orientation or gender identity is not important, wrong, or something to hide.

Literature can also serve as a window. A child can learn about the experiences of another group. The reader peers into another world and encounters what it is like to live through the eyes of someone else.

The sliding glass door is more than looking through the window of another group. The book draws you into another world.

The sliding glass door, according to Koss, also pertains to “the feeling that I am not done with this book because it has changed me. It is more than empathy. It can be a call for action.”

A second reason for Koss’s concern is that there has been a lack of diversity in children’s books.

“Typically, the characters have been White, and if there is diversity, the characters have been very stereotypical,” elaborates Koss. For example, African Americans are often depicted as belonging to gangs or a lower socioeconomic status or, in historical fiction, as enslaved people, and that does not accurately reflect all African Americans.

If anyone knows about the representation of diversity in children’s and young adult literature, it is Koss. She is busy with many projects, using and revising complex coding schemes, as well as multicultural analysis and critical theory, to analyze literature.

According to Koss, there is some good news in that diversity in literature is increasing.

“If you look at book lists and the American Library Association Youth Media Award winners, you see some increase in diversity, and that is exciting,” said Koss.

Increasing diversity in children’s literature is important because racial diversity is growing in the United States. This is a third reason for Koss’s concern.

“Over 50% of public school K-12 kids are nonwhite. And that is projected to increase by 2024,” mentions Koss. She also emphasizes that diversity in itself is diverse. It should not just be limited to race, religion, and gender.

If you were the only kid in your third-grade class who wore glasses, you know what that means.

As the United States becomes more diverse and hate speech becomes more accessible via the Internet, it is important that children learn appreciation for other cultures and peoples.

“Literature can help students see things differently in a safe way when teachers and students talk. A child can ask about a character’s actions or features in a way that does not seem threatening,” Koss explained.

Koss mentions that her coding scheme, along with critical theories, can be applied not just to literature, but also to TV and movies.

In sum, the next time you shop for children’s or young adult books for a loved one, you may want to peel back the covers to see whether and how diversity is presented.

About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.

Can Diagrams of your Knowledge Help you Learn? - Kyung Kim

Kyung Kim

You probably already know that knowledge is not stored willy-nilly in our minds. Rather, it is structured.

How knowledge is structured in the human mind fascinates Dr. Kyung Kim, a CISLL affiliate in the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment, housed in NIU’s College of Education.

“Knowledge structure refers to how the concepts in a domain are related to one another in memory. We believe knowledge structures can be represented in a network form that can be depicted visually,” explains Kim.

To get an idea of how a knowledge structure can be depicted visually, imagine a diagram consisting of a dozen or so circles haphazardly placed on a page, with lines connecting some of the circles.

If the topic of the structure is the “heart”, then the individual circles might represent particular concepts related to the heart, such as “blood” “pulmonary valve”, “lung”, and so on.

A line between any two concepts indicates that they are conceptually connected in the person’s memory. Some concepts may be linked to many other concepts, whereas others may be only linked to one.

This sort of visual network of a student’s knowledge organization can help instructors assess the learning of their students.

For example, if a student knows that the pulmonary valve pumps oxygen-rich blood to the lungs, then that student would connect the concepts “pulmonary valve” and “lungs” if asked to draw their network. A lack of a line, or other deviations from an “ideal” network, would indicate that student’s knowledge is incomplete and may include misconceptions.

However, having students draw out their knowledge so that the instructor can provide timely and accurate feedback is not very efficient. Imagine being an instructor with hundreds of knowledge maps to grade every night, and you can see why. Instructors get tired and may make mistakes, and it might be days before students receive feedback.

In addition, most students are more used to writing essays than creating these types of concept maps.

In response to these and other educational needs and constraints, Kim developed a computer application called GIKS, which stands for Graphical Interface of Knowledge Structure.

Based on written input (e.g., a summary essay or a transcribed conversation), GIKS uses various existing computerized analytic tools (e.g., ALA-reader, Pathfinder) that together create a visual representation of the organization of preselected concepts mentioned in the input.

That visual representation would be similar to the circles and lines mentioned earlier.

GIKS allows an instructor (or researcher) to input a “master” text that provides the information of the to-be-learned knowledge structure (e.g., a textbook passage). A student (or research participant) can write and input a summary essay about the topic. This essay would reflect the student’s knowledge. Then GIKS produces visual representations of both the master text and the student’s essay and compares them.

“GIKS gives the student immediate feedback in an easy-to-understand visual way. It gives them information as to which concepts were correctly included, as well as missing concepts, and correct and incorrect links among the concepts,” explains Kim.

With GIKS, students do not need to wait for the instructor to provide feedback. Feedback is instantaneous.

Since the tool is web-based, it is ideal for online courses, and because it uses text as input, it can be used in many content domains. Thus far, Kim has studied learning in physics, biology, geography, and foreign language.

What is also nice about GIKS is that it allows a student to input a summary essay at different points in time. This allows the student (and possibly the instructor or researcher) to see how knowledge changes as a new domain is learned.

“In addition to being useful for assessment, we have also shown that students learn by receiving feedback via GIKS,” said Kim.

In a publication with co-authors Roy Clarianay and NIU professor Yanghee Kim, tenth-grade students in an online physics course who used GIKS as a reflective tool included more relevant connections and fewer irrelevant connections in their summary essays than did students who were given explanatory videos or test questions, other known ways to increase learning.

Excitingly, GIKS is being acclaimed by educational technology researchers as well as other academic communities.

Kim was recently awarded the 2019 AECT Young Researcher Award from the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, the most prestigious association in Educational Technology. The award recognized a GIKS study that analyzed participants’ text messages to explore the dynamics of online collaborative problem solving. His dissertation, which used GIKS to explore the influence of text structures on readers’ knowledge structures, also won the 2019 Timothy & Cynthia Shanahan Outstanding Dissertation Award from the International Literacy Association. A study that applied GIKS to geography was recently selected for the 2019 Journal of Geography Award from the National Council for Geographic Education.

Kim is now interested in augmenting GIKS with speech-recognition capability. This feature would allow him to examine how individuals’ knowledge structures, as revealed through their speech, can be harnessed and used effectively in real-world collaborative work settings.

“Groups spend too much time discussing information that everyone in the group already knows. However, there is little research on how unshared information can play a role in collaborative learning. Having GIKS analyze both text and speech would be an ideal way to help groups know what other members know and don’t know. Perhaps by emphasizing unique knowledge held by an individual, group learning could be enhanced,” volunteered Kim.

In sum, the answer to the question “Can diagrams of your knowledge help you learn?” is a resounding “Yes”—provided the diagrams were created by GIKS, of course.

If you are interested in learning more about GIKS, you can contact Professor Kim at kkim2@niu.edu.

About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.

How Does a Bilingual Environment Affect Language Development? – Milijana Buac

Milijana Buac

Language is a fundamental aspect of being human. Being able to understand and produce language allows one to create strong social and emotional bonds with friends and family and to fully participate in society.

It is therefore not surprising that when parents receive news that their young toddler may have a language disorder, they become worried and concerned.

According to Dr. Milijana Buac, this news may be problematic if the child is reared in a bilingual environment. “In my work, I noticed that the language-assessment tools were biased against bilingual children. They are biased because they were not normed using bilingual children but monolingual children.”

This is a problem because often the bilingual children score lower on these assessments when compared to monolinguals peers, sparking concerns of a delay.

“A low score by a bilingual child may not indicate a language disorder but just a language difference, reflecting the fact that they are learning two languages.” explained Buac.

A CISLL affiliate, Buac is on the faculty of the Speech-Language Pathology Unit housed within the Allied Health and Communicative Disorders Division within NIU’s College of Health and Human Sciences. Buac is a speech-language pathologist by training.

Using biased language-assessment tools is a problem potentially affecting many lives. In fact, 22% of children in the United States speak a language other than English at home.

Buac studies how a bilingual context affects language and cognitive development and how to make such language assessment tools less biased.

As one example of her research on language development, her dissertation used an eye-tracking visual world paradigm to examine how monolingual and bilingual children learn new words from non-native input.

In the visual world paradigm, participants are shown four unfamiliar objects on a screen. Each object is presented with a spoken presentation of a new “name” for each. The new name is a made-up word, so that it is unfamiliar to all participants. Later, participants are shown two of the objects and hear the word that was presented with one of them. Using an eye-tracker, the researcher measures whether and how quickly the child looks to the correctly-paired object. A shorter response delay and higher proportion of looks to the correct object indicates that the child has learned the new word.

In her dissertation, Buac was interested in how accents may impact the learning of new words. She presented the “names” in the visual world paradigm to typically-developing children in three different accents: native English, Spanish-accented English, and Korean-accented English.

The accents approximate how mono- and bilingual children may learn new words at home. English-Spanish bilingual children would be familiar with both native English and Spanish accents, whereas the monolingual children would only be familiar with the native English accent. Both types of speakers would be less familiar with the Korean accent.

She found that children living in a monolingual native English family learned new words best when presented by a native English-accented speaker, followed by a Spanish-accented English speaker, followed by a Korean-accented English speaker. However, children living in a bilingual environment showed no difference in learning between the native English and Spanish accents, and both of these led to higher learning than words presented in a Korean accent.

“The results showed that the familiarity of the accent matters. If you are familiar with the accent, then you learn new words faster than if you are not,” explained Buac. “I looked at learning because previous research has looked at how accents affect the time to process language but not on how accents affect learning.”

Buac is extending this research by looking at word learning in children who have a language impairment.

“The reason why I wanted to start with typically-developing children is to get a baseline. Now I would like to see if the accents are a greater impediment for children with a language disorder. A primary theory of language impairment assumes that the impaired individual has trouble processing spoken input. I would expect that children with a language disorder would be hindered even more than usual when presented with new words in an unfamiliar accent,” elaborated Buac.

As an expert in language disorders, Buac gets many questions from concerned parents.

In particular, she is often asked by parents of a child in a bilingual environment who have been newly diagnosed with a language disorder which language should be spoken at home.

“I tell them to speak which language they are most comfortable with. Never take away a language, because if a child is able to learn one language, they are going to be able to learn another. Parents often think it is better to stick to one language, let’s say English. But that could hinder the child if no one else in the family speaks English,” explained Buac.

As a new faculty member at NIU, Buac is busy planning future experiments and writing grants to fund research on how bilingual contexts affect language and cognitive development.

About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.